By Annie Palmer For Dailymail.com
Published: 21:07 BST, 24 May 2019 | Updated: 21:07 BST, 24 May 2019
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The US Senate has passed a new bill that could help spell the end of robocall misery.
In a nearly unanimous vote, they voted to pass the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act, which threatens to slap scammers with heavy fines for each robocall they make.
The move comes as legislators, government agencies and consumer advocacy groups have ramped up calls to bring an end to the scourge of unwanted calls that affect millions of consumers every year.
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In a nearly unanimous vote, senators voted to pass the TRACED Act, which threatens to slap scammers with heavy fines, some as much as $10,000, for each robocall they make
A new report from caller ID service Hiya found that Americans received a whopping 26.3 billion spam calls in 2018.
That marks a 46 percent increase from 2017, when users logged about 18 billion robocalls.
What's more, as people in the U.S. get a barrage of spam calls, many are increasingly choosing not to answer the phone at all.
In its analysis, Hiya found that people received an average of about 10 spam calls per month.
People received about 60 incoming calls from 'unrecognized numbers or numbers not linked to a person in their contact list.'
The top area codes that were targeted by spam callers in 2018 were Texas cities including Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth.
Of the spam calls received, most of them were 'general spam,' followed by fraud, telemarketers and robocallers.
Robocalls have become so common that a 2018 report predicted almost 50 percent of all
